


This Is a Ghost Story

by plutosrose



Series: Stucky Bingo 2020 [9]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, Captain America Bucky Barnes, M/M, Propaganda, Slow Burn, Steve Rogers as the Winter Soldier, Winter soldier torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:15:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 16,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28440759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plutosrose/pseuds/plutosrose
Summary: February 1945, Steve Rogers crashes the Valkyrie.March 1945, a massive effort is undertaken by the Americans to replace his deeds with James "Bucky" Barnes, who now has always been Captain America.As for Steve Rogers?According to the U.S. government, he never existed.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Alpine, James "Bucky" Barnes & Natasha Romanov, James "Bucky" Barnes & Peggy Carter, James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: Stucky Bingo 2020 [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1830826
Comments: 53
Kudos: 81
Collections: Stucky Bingo 2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> If you'd like to find me on Tumblr, I'm here [plutosrose](https://plutosrose.tumblr.com/). I'm also officially on Twitter at [@plutosrose1](https://twitter.com/plutosrose1/)

He visited Peggy every other Thursday like clockwork, arriving at the assisted living home in Adams Morgan and fixing the visitor’s badge to his jacket while the nurses made small talk with him.

It wasn’t all bad, all things considered. After the first few times he’d visited Peggy there, they’d mostly stopped asking for things like autographs or selfies, and said things like, “Hello Mr. Barnes, it’s nice to see you.” and “Summer in DC is the absolute worst, I hope you’re staying cool!” instead of “Oh my God, you’re Captain America!”

But this Thursday, unfortunately, wasn’t like all of those other Thursdays, because as soon as he’d entered Peggy’s room (and breathed a sigh of relief to see her sitting up, awake, and smiling her old smile), she’d dumped a newspaper in his lap.

**The National Museum of American History Commemorates Seventy Years of Captain America**

_James “Bucky” Barnes, also known by his war-time codename, Captain America, will be commemorated in a special exhibit at the National Museum of American History this month. Seventy years ago, as World War II neared its climax, Barnes crashed the Hydra bomber known as the Valkyrie into the Arctic, saving millions of lives._

_The exhibit will reportedly include one-of-a-kind Howling Commandos artifacts that are on loan from private collections, and a source at the Smithsonian has reported that Barnes himself will tour the exhibit first when it opens next week._

_**By: Angela Dickinson, The New York Times, February 1, 2015.** _

“It’s all a bunch of fucking bullshit,” Bucky grunted, throwing the newspaper back on Peggy’s nightstand. The last thing that he wanted to look at was a picture of himself, surrounded by the Howling Commandos, especially since he knew that Steve should have been standing just off to the right, out of frame. How could a picture be so real and so fake at the same time?

“You and I both know it is,” Peggy said gently. If she wasn’t angry now, it was only because she’d spent so many decades angry about Steve’s disappearance. She was tired and old now, and now Bucky had to carry all of their angry and frustration for the both of them.

“You know, there was a time when more than just us knew,” Bucky looked down at the paper, frowning. “It isn’t fair what happened to him.”

Life wasn’t fair in general--it had taken Dugan in 1973, Falsworth in ‘87, Morita in '89, Dernier and Howard in ‘91, and Gabe in ‘03. They’d been honored with state funerals, attended by presidents and prime ministers and even the fucking Queen of England. Bucky had hated each of these funerals, and not just because the circle of people who had known both him and Steve had been shrinking before his eyes, with him helpless to stop it.

Because at each and every one of those funerals, someone with a meaningless title like “Liaison to the Office of Blah Blah Blah” had gotten up and delivered a eulogy about how Dugan or Falsworth or Dernier or Gabe had followed James Barnes into the jaws of death to deliver a killing blow to the Nazi science division HYDRA, as if he was a leader of men, full of a stupid amount of courage and ideals like Steve had been. As if he’d done anything to warrant his name being said in front of Queen Elizabeth II.

“No,” Peggy sighed, closing her eyes for a few seconds. “It isn’t fair. None of it’s fair. He deserved so much more than what he got.”

What Steve had gotten was his name scrubbed off of every Howling Commandos mention, event, and memorial, including the one in Arlington Cemetery, which made Bucky angry every year that he showed up to put wreaths on veterans’ graves at Christmas time. Sarah Rogers, according to the archives that he’d accessed at the New York Public Library, Smithsonian, and SHIELD (this last one had made him apoplectic when he’d found out, and he and Peggy hadn’t spoken for a solid three years), all said that she’d immigrated to the United States in 1917 from Ireland. That she was a nurse. That’s it. No mention of any child--Steve, or otherwise. After that, she disappeared from the archives entirely.

Steve, however, hadn’t been there at all.

Photos of Steve performing from the early-1940s had all been bought up by the late-1950s, and now, the few times they’d surfaced in the decades since, he was a nameless performer, someone that had been hired to stand in for him since he was out in the field, his operations too precious to risk.

Peggy reached out and held his hand in hers. “I’m sorry, James, that it had to happen this way.”

Nothing had to happen any way, but it was something that Bucky had long become accustomed to. After they’d won the war, the world had been pulled apart at the seams instead of being stitched back together again, and the newly founded SHIELD had become the last line of defense against the Soviets.

And Captain America being alive, and not somewhere under water, had been a key part of the nation’s Cold War defense strategy.

So Steve had disappeared.

“Well,” Bucky said, licking his lips. “They can print it all they want, but I’m not going.”

Peggy laughed. “You were always quite stubborn.”

A small smile graced his features. “Yeah, well, I learned from the best. Him...and you.”

Peggy smiled a wry smile that made Bucky see her like he did when she was young--perfect victory rolls in her hair, perfect red manicure and red lipstick, long legs and so much fire in her heart that she practically burned with it. There’d been a time when he’d been perilously close to marrying her, until he realized that the main reason he’d wanted that was to keep the memory of Steve as close as possible.

“He’d want you to carry on his legacy, and be the symbol that people needed,” Peggy said, caressing his hand. “We would have worked with you, you know.”

“It’s not much of a legacy if nobody knows he existed,” Bucky grumbled. It felt like it was impossible to stop himself from having this argument with Peggy every time that he went to visit her. It all came back to Steve, Steve, Steve, always. Steve was the one who had wanted to go to war, and now that Steve was gone, and had been gone for a long time, he was the one stuck with it.

“Just think about it,” Peggy said, looking mournful for a moment, before her eyes widened. “James, James is that you?”

The hard edges of Bucky’s expression melted away. “Yeah, Peggy, it’s me.”

“Oh James,” she murmured, smiling sadly as she squeezed his hand. “I’m so happy you’re okay. I’m so happy that the war is over.”

“Yeah,” Bucky smiled back, although the smile did not reach his eyes. “I’m happy it’s over too.”

_-_

_**Natasha** : The president wants to schedule a meet w/you_

_**Me** : what is this about?_

_**Natasha** : it’s above my pay grade, apparently _

_**Me** : Tell him to kiss my ass_

_**Natasha** : hmm I could do that, or you could do that in person. _

_**Me** : fine. Can you help me get a meet the same day as that stupid Captain America exhibit?_

_**Natasha** : you want to miss that? Never would have guessed._

Bucky put his phone down and scrubbed a hand over his face, before looking around the same apartment that he’d lived in for the past ten years, feeling a sudden emptiness wash over him. Every time he went to see Peggy, he felt better and worse. Connected to the past, connected to Steve, and at the same time, filled with a curious sensation that he was living another man’s life.

Alpine leapt up onto his lap, kneading him slowly, before she curled up and fell asleep again before his phone went off.

_**Natasha** : 1:30pm, ROTUS will escort you  
**Natasha** : don’t blow off the president  
**Natasha** : again  
**Natasha** : or at least this time, give me some heads up  
**Natasha** : because that was kind of hysterical _

Bucky let out a breathy laugh and shook his head.

_**Me** : you have a deal _

He sighed and leaned back on the couch, fumbling through the cushions for where he’d last dropped the remote. But the second he turned the television on, he saw himself, in Steve’s uniform, staring back at him, in a fucking advertisement for the exhibit.

Of course, it wasn’t really an advertisement. Two anchors were going back and forth about how ‘special’ this anniversary was, but Bucky knew bullshit when he saw it, and it wasn’t just because he’d grown accustomed to seeing doctored photos of himself over the past seventy years.

Alpine perked up a little at the noise coming from the television. Bucky stroked her fur. “Your daddy is on television,” he said, and she gave a very unimpressed sounding meow.

“Yeah, I think it’s stupid too,” he murmured.

-

Right before bed, his phone buzzed again.

Alpine shifted on the pillow next to him as he reached over and unlocked his phone.

_**Natasha** : check your email_

_**Natasha** : not the SHIELD one, the good one_

He swiped his way over to the account that Natasha had set up for him, and frowned at the grainy image that was attached to her most recent message.

_**Me** : what is this?  
**Me** : how did you even get this?_

_**Natasha** : don’t ask questions you don’t want the answer to, james  
**Natasha** : anyway, I think it’s what your meet tomorrow is about_

Bucky stared long and hard at the photo, an assassin up on a water tower. He blinked at it, before shrugging and falling back asleep.

In the dark, in his dreams, the picture merged with Steve, until all he could see was a killer with Steve’s eyes.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter beta'd by xceru <3

In nearly seventy years, Bucky had never gotten used to this, the desire of presidents to speak to him like he was really involved in national security. He rubbed his hands against his dress pants--Natasha had bought them for him just to ‘make him stop going to see the president in jeans, as funny as it is.’ 

_“They’re trying to make me into Captain America, Peggy,” he’d said--Germany had yet to surrender the war, but months out and the end felt perilously close. More and more German soldiers were throwing down their weapons the moment that they reached their cities. News of Schmidt’s defeat--even as Hydra had defected from the Nazi Party--had been demoralizing to the German troops. “I just got word from Phillips that this is coming directly from the president - how could they do this?”_

_“It’s bad enough that Steve is gone--they’re trying to make me into something that I’m not. I won’t do it.”_

_And Peggy, unflappable, unsinkable Peggy, who Steve had looked at like she hung the moon and the stars, looked at him with tired eyes. “I’m sorry, James. I tried.” Her voice broke. “I tried.”_

He rubbed his hands against his thighs a little harder, trying to distract himself. After being alive for so long, memories had the unfortunate habit of coming back up at the worst possible times, distinct and blending together at the same time. 

_“You want me to do_ what _?” Bucky furrowed his brow at Phillips. “I’m not going to lead a company into Berlin as Captain America and pretend that I was at the Führerbunker so the American people can have a story about Hitler getting punched out by a superhero--that’s completely ridiculous. It’s….it’s horrible. Nobody has any right to pretend that anything other than what happened happened.”_

_To Phillips’s credit, he didn’t look overly enthused by the idea. “These are orders coming directly from the president.”_

_Bucky’s jaw twitched with the impulse to say, ‘the president can kiss my ass.’_

_He didn’t lead a company into Berlin in the end, dressed as Captain America. In the end, a man who looked very much like him did, pictures splashed across newspapers around the country, headlines proclaiming CAPTAIN AMERICA LIBERATES GERMANY AND ENDS WAR ON EUROPEAN FRONT._

_Bucky fished a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it, even though the smell of smoke was beginning to remind him of blood and bombs. He took a long drag before he lit the paper on fire._

It’s bullshit.

He’s young, sure. He’s been alive for almost a hundred years and still looks like he’s in his mid-30s (40s, Natasha would say). Zola had replicated Project Rebirth more or less, he wasn’t too clear on the science behind it. Peggy had interviewed Zola in the early 1950s about his work, but had gotten a lot of half-answers. Bucky still barely understood his own body. 

But just because he and Steve had undergone the same ridiculous comic book science medical procedure didn’t make him Captain America. Not even close. 

But now, it doesn’t matter, because he’s stuck. A man out of time, adrift in a world that was desperately trying to pass him by every single day. 

He spent more time each day, tired and willing to retreat as far into his memories as he can possibly go to have just one moment of peace. One moment of silence to himself. 

_”How can they do this?” he slapped a newspaper down on Peggy’s desk so aggressively that she jumped out of her seat. “I don’t want any part of this--this--this should be Steve. This isn’t me.”_

_Steve was the one who had tried to desperately fling himself into any fight he came across, up to and including the actual war._

_Bucky wasn’t a fighter. He’d never been one. Never on his own._

_“Well, they’re not actually you, they’re Captain America,” Peggy said tightly, which made Bucky feel incandescently angry, eyes widening and bulging with rage._

_“Fuck the SSR for one second, Carter,” he grumbled, which prompted Peggy to give him a sharp look. “This isn’t about your pet project or the fucking president, this is about what’s right. And this isn’t.”_

_“I know that,” she said, rising out of her seat and planting her hands on her desk, like a jungle cat about to pounce. “But sometimes, Barnes, what is right is far more complicated than what we want.”_

“Mr. Barnes?” Annabelle Lundy, the White House’s receptionist, came down the corridor with a clipboard in her hands. “The president will see you now.” 

Bucky nodded and stood up, grabbing his coat off of the chair as he followed her to the Oval Office. 

_“They’ll probably throw you a parade when the war is over,” Bucky leaned over and gave Steve a playful tap on the shoulder. Even in the dark, Steve couldn’t hide how bright his smile was. “A big parade for Captain America who defeated all of Krauts and saved the world from Hitler’s Germany.”_

_Steve wrinkled his nose. “I don’t want parades. All I did was go to war and lay down my life just like everyone else. I don’t need a parade for doing what every other man is doing out here.”_

_Bucky snorted. “Yeah, because you’ve never had anything to prove.”_

_“I’m serious, Buck! It’s not about parades. I don’t want to meet politicians or the goddamn president, even. I just want to do what’s right._

Annabelle opened the door to the office first, and Bucky followed behind her, wondering what Steve would think if he were here--maybe he’d think it was ridiculous to be a little impressed by the idea of the Oval Office, as much as Bucky had wanted to tell presidents to fuck off through the ages. 

Matthew Ellis was sitting behind his desk, tapping his fingers impatiently when they arrived. “Thank you, Annabelle, you may go.” 

Once Annabelle was gone and the two of them were left alone, Bucky shifted uncomfortably, standing stiffly in front of the desk. 

“Please, take a seat.”

He sunk down into one of the plush couches in front of the desk, worrying his lip.

Ellis had become terrifyingly popular after he’d been kidnapped after the start of his presidency, and the man’s strict bearing and unflappable demeanor sometimes made Bucky wonder if Tony and Colonel Rhodes hadn’t saved him, but instead, he had simply scared his way out of confinement. 

He leaned forward, folding his hands on his desk, and fixing Bucky with a steely, impenetrable glare. 

“We have reason to believe in the existence of a certain...phenomenon,” Ellis said carefully, which made Bucky raise an eyebrow at him, tension draining out his body.

“Like what? Aliens?” That might have been a bad example, considering Thor’s recent appearance in New Mexico. SHIELD had a hell of a time cleaning up after him. He struggled to think of something more ridiculous. “Little green men from Mars?” 

Ellis drew his mouth into a sharp line. “No.” 

“Then what?”

“Every president since FDR has been aware of your, ah, lack of involvement with Captain America.” Ellis said this tightly, and Bucky had to look a little amused, because years ago he’d argued with Nixon about this very point. “And that while you agreed to have your image used for the program, that is...all you agreed to.”

“Did you have a reason for asking me to come here? Or did you just want to lecture me about how involved I am with the U.S. government’s favorite superhero project?” Bucky asked breezily, leaning back further into the couch. Shit, that was actually extremely comfortable. 

“In the intelligence community, as you may be aware, there is a certain individual--or individuals--known as the Winter Soldier,” Ellis said carefully, eyes fixed on Bucky. He seemed to be waiting for some kind of reaction, but Bucky had no idea what. “He is confirmed to have assassinated more than two dozen world leaders and individuals of other international importance. Those are just the ones that have been confirmed by our agencies over the years.” 

Ellis beckoned him over to the desk, and slid a picture across from it. The man’s face was hidden, but Bucky would have recognized those eyes anywhere. 

He slid the picture back toward Ellis, narrowing his eyes dangerously. “I don’t know what you’re suggesting, but Steve Rogers drowned in the Arctic in 1945. I’ve lived with that every fucking day since he got on the Valkyrie to try and take down The Red Skull.”

Ellis shook his head. “We have reason to believe that he may have survived. This was taken last week, and CIA analysts have cross-checked it with other photographs that we have acquired of the Winter Soldier through the years.”

Another photograph, which made Bucky’s blood run cold. This was unmistakably Steve, deep blue eyes and shaggy, unkempt blond hair. He was angled away from the camera, as though he hoped to have it obscure his face.

_They were twenty miles behind German lines. That night by the fire, Steve reached over and tousled his hair a little._

_“Hey!” Bucky barked out, hands flying up to fix his hair immediately, to cackles from the rest of the Commandos._

_“See,” Steve said, grinning from ear-to-ear. “There’s nothing in this world that Sergeant Barnes cares about more than his hair. Even in the middle of a goddamn warzone. Me? I couldn’t care less. Drives him nuts.”_

“James?” Ellis prompted. He could have mistaken the look in his eyes for compassion, if it wasn’t for the fact that Bucky could easily tell that his entire body was drawn tight with tension and stress. Bucky couldn’t blame him, really, because the one time that he’d contacted him about having more Captain America events, he’d blown off the meeting. Ellis, who was notoriously fixated on punctuality and order, couldn’t have liked that much. Or really, him, very much. 

“I’m fine,” Bucky shook his head. “Are you sure it’s him?”

Asking was pointless. He knew him. He would know him anywhere. 

“James…”

“Are you sure it’s him?” he asked again, his tone sharper and more insistent. “You have a dozen guys out there at any given time who all look like me, are you, how could he be--are you sure it’s him?” 

His breath was coming in sharp pants, and the room was starting to feel as though it was tilting on its axis. He cradled his head in his hands. “That can’t possibly be him.” _I won’t let it be him._

“I recognize the fact that you have chosen to live your life outside of government service,” Ellis said crisply, as if handing over his likeness to be used as the government pleased wasn’t actually ‘government service.’ “But we would very much like you to be involved on this one. We are concerned that he might be Hydra, and if he is, you are the only hope we have of being able to bring him in safely.” 

_”I wanted you to hear it from me, we’re bringing Zola in,” Peggy said gently, as though she was afraid she’d spook him. “Well, I shouldn’t say we’re just bringing him in, we’ve made him an offer.”_

_Bucky’s eyes widened. He could still see Zola when he closed his eyes at night, hovering over him, poking him with needles and cutting open his skin with a scalpel. He never told Steve about the scars that closed up overnight. It was only after Steve had gone down in the Valkyrie that he’d finally told Peggy the full extent of what had happened to him._

_“You can’t be serious--Steve and I,” Bucky’s chest ached when he said Steve’s name. “We risked our lives boarding that train in the Alps. You can’t just...You can’t just do that.”_

_Again, Peggy looked resigned. Worried. Tired. “I don’t want to do it. But as far as anyone in the intelligence community knows, he’s the only scientist out there who has been able to replicate Project Rebirth’s experiment. We need him on our side.”_

Bucky looked back down at the photo. 

“I don’t know where you got your information, but Steve Rogers would never be Hydra,” Bucky said pointedly. 

The corner of Ellis’s mouth twitched. “I see.” 

Bucky could see blue when he squeezed his eyes shut and tried to force himself to breathe, his mind racing as he tried to figure out what to say. “If something happened to him, I need to know.” 

Ellis kept his expression impenetrably neutral. “I’m afraid that the full extent of that information cannot be released due to national security concerns. However…”

His expression softened for a moment. “I can tell you that we believe he has survived since the Valkyrie crashed in 1945. I can tell that we believe that he is currently acting alone, but we are still investigating whether or not he’s had contact with other Hydra members.”

“I just told you--” Bucky started, suddenly hearing Natasha in the back of his head, reminding him to play nice with the President of the United States after the last time that he’d blown him off. The memory would be ridiculous if he thought about it too hard, but like most things now, he tended not to.

Another photograph this time--this one of a warehouse, with the serpentine hydra emblazoned on the front doors. Blood. Bucky didn’t even want to know who it belonged to, and judging by the smug look on Ellis’s face, he knew exactly what he was thinking. 

“You were saying?”

“I was saying you have the wrong man,” Bucky snapped, angry and numb at the same time. 

“Are you saying the CIA is wrong? The FBI? SHIELD?”

Bucky was ready to do just that, before Ellis got to SHIELD, and he thought of Peggy. He knew that Ellis wanted him to think of Peggy. 

Ellis let out an exasperated sigh, and silence fell between them, until it all began to add up, detail by tortuous detail. 

“You want me to go out there and reassure people about this?” Bucky raised an eyebrow. “That there isn’t some Hydra lunatic out there that the American government hasn’t been able to catch?”

Ellis broke into a wide grin. “If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, yes, I would appreciate it, and I’m sure that the American people would also appreciate it. Get out ahead of this thing--it’s only a matter of time before every news station out there has photos of the Hydra symbols that are being left everywhere he goes.”

“And if I don’t do it?”

_”I’m not going to do it. I don’t want to be a part of it. I just want to go the fuck home,” Bucky told Peggy in one of the few bars they’d come across in Germany that hadn’t been completely wrecked and/or full of Nazis. “Live my life.”_

_Even sitting there, in that bar with Peggy, it wasn’t hard for him to acknowledge the fact that every single one of his thoughts about life after the war had come unglued after Steve had crashed._

_“They’re not going to live your life,” Peggy admitted into her beer. “They’ll hound you until you give in.”_

_Bucky lit a cigarette, trying to force his hands to stop shaking. “So what do you suggest I do?”_

_“Give in. But only on your terms, and your terms only. Be Captain America without being Captain America.”_

“Someone else will have to bring Rogers in,” Ellis said flatly, unimpressed by his resistance. 

“Okay,” Bucky managed, what felt like bile rising in his throat. “Okay.” 

-

The moment that he left the White House and got back in the car to be driven back to his apartment, he was shaking badly.

With trembling hands, he texted Natasha three words.

 **Me:** _Can’t do this._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This Is a Ghost Story - Chapter 2  
> Creator(s): plutosrose  
> Card number: 012  
> Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28440759/chapters/69693645  
> Square filled: C1, Germany  
> Rating: E  
> Archive warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply  
> Major tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, Steve Rogers as the Winter Soldier, Captain America Bucky Barnes, Winter Soldier Torture, Propaganda  
> Summary:
> 
> February 1945, Steve Rogers crashes the Valkyrie.
> 
> March 1945, a massive effort is undertaken by the Americans to replace his deeds with James "Bucky" Barnes, who now has always been Captain America.
> 
> As for Steve Rogers?
> 
> According to the U.S. government, he never existed.
> 
> Word count: 2,660 (Chapter 2)


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks again to xceru for the beta <3

Natasha’s reply to his text didn’t come through until he was back in his apartment, which felt so well-timed that part of him had to wonder if she was tracking him.

Then he remembered this was Natasha he was talking about, so of course she was tracking him. 

_I’ll be there in 20. Just turn on the tv. Don’t do anything else until I get there._

-

“They want me to do a press conference,” he said the moment that Natasha opened the door. Natasha, for her part, raised a finger to her lips and crept inside, eyes scanning the room. 

Natasha moved catlike throughout his apartment, standing delicately on top of a chair to unscrew an overhead light and leaning underneath sofas and chairs. Every time she found a bug, she tutted to herself, blowing a strand of deep red hair out of her eyes. 

“You’re getting sloppy,” she said, and it was both an observation and an accusation. Natasha held his gaze for a moment, presumably so he could absorb the depths of her disappointment, before she started running her fingers underneath the cabinets in the kitchen. 

“I’m not very interesting,” Bucky shrugged. Natasha arched an eyebrow as she pinched a tiny device between her fingers until the light on it stopped blinking. “It didn’t exactly matter if someone picked up something. What were they going to do, try to haul me out in front of the House on Un-American Activities Committee? Last I checked the United States doesn’t do that kind of thing anymore.”

Which had, as it happened, come very close to happening before Peggy had worked her magic on a few key senators, and told him to stop meeting men for sex in Lafayette Park.

Natasha fixed him with a steely, impenetrable stare. “You don’t seriously think that Ellis wouldn’t string you up in public if it would help his approval ratings?” She tutted to herself, and Bucky, who had lived through the Great Depression, World War II, and the entire fucking Cold War, couldn’t escape the feeling that he was about to get a lecture about the intricacies of American politics from a Soviet agent. 

“You were convenient for them,” Natasha said, as she reached behind the porcelain jars on his counter--for flour and sugar and things like that, he didn’t fucking know, he never cooked, “If we start digging around in places that certain people don’t want us to, then neither of us are going to be convenient for anyone.” 

Bucky, for a moment, was filled with the impulse to defend the fact that he was anything other than a convenience, but that was the sad truth of the matter, wasn’t it? Captain America’s best friend from childhood, inseparable on the schoolyard and battlefield, and if they wanted to give Steve’s life to anyone, who better than the guy who was standing next to him in most of the pictures that were now in the Smithsonian? 

“Why are you helping me?” he asked, furrowing his brow. 

Natasha put a finger to her lips as she reached behind the fridge and found another bug. Once she’d turned it off, she added it with the others that she’d found in a little pile on the counter. “Do I need a reason? Don’t Americans all believe that Captain America is a good guy that they should follow into battle no matter what?”

Bucky gave her an unamused look. “Haven’t you been in the United States for a while?”

Natasha grinned at him in the unsettling way that she sometimes did, when she was daring him to start poking around in a topic that he probably didn’t want to know about. 

She shrugged. “I haven’t always done what’s right. But...maybe I’d like to start. And helping you with this seems like the best way to do that.” 

He was stuck by the intensity of affection that he felt for her--it was the same kind of affection that had almost moved him to marry Peggy. 

But just as quickly as the moment came, it was gone. Natasha’s face once again became a study in neutrality.

“Alright, since all of the bugs are taken care of, start talking.”

Bucky took a deep breath and nodded. 

“Ellis wants me to give a press conference about these Hydra murders. He really showed me pictures of…” He trailed off, thinking of the dead look in Steve’s eyes in the photos. “You know I can’t just sit back if he’s out there.” Officially, Steve might not have been ‘out there,’ but that wouldn’t stop him from looking for him. “Who the fuck knows why he’s still alive and what happened to him.”

Judging by the pictures that Ellis had shown him in the Oval Office, nothing good. He didn’t need any evidence besides the look in Steve’s eyes to know that, deep down in the pit of his soul. 

“Well,” Natasha said, leaning back against the counter. “We know the answer to the first one - Erksine. It’s probably the same reason that you don’t look like you’re a day over forty-two.”

“Very flattering, I look at least forty-five, but continue.” 

A flicker of amusement played across Natasha’s features, which made Bucky feel a little smug, because she was usually so neutral, so hard to read. 

“As for your second question,” Natasha mused, “that’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? Steve Rogers might not exist anymore in public, but even SHIELD has him down as dying in 1945, drowning in the Valkyrie crash.” 

“The CIA doesn’t,” Bucky pointed out, and Natasha snorted. 

“Like the CIA knows fuck all.” 

“They’re the ones who got the pictures of him,” Bucky’s mouth twisted at the thought of someone being close enough to photograph Steve and not bothering to find out what happened to him. Not helping him. 

That wasn’t a mistake that he was going to make. 

“Okay,” Natasha nodded. “Okay, that’s good to know. We can use that. I have friends there.” Bucky wasn’t quite sure if Natasha actually had friends in these agencies or she was just hacking her way through their firewalls. But, he supposed, it didn’t really matter, as long as Natasha was on his side. 

“What am I supposed to do about this press conference, though?” Bucky furrowed his brow. “I can’t just stand up there and pretend that it wasn’t Steve.” 

“I don’t think Ellis is really giving you much of a choice,” Natasha said, and at once, this was what he loved and hated about her, just like he’d loved and hated this about Peggy. Both of them saw the world exactly as it was, even when it wasn’t nice or convenient for them or anyone else. “Besides, if you do this press conference, and you say exactly what Ellis wants you to say, that could be helpful. Could buy us some time.” 

Natasha did have a point about that, it would be much easier to get information about Steve if Ellis thought that he was on his side. It would be easier to figure out what to do if he eventually caught up to Steve, too. But for the moment, as he leaned back against the counter opposite Natasha, he couldn’t think about that. After decades of thinking Steve was dead, being faced with the possibility that he might be alive-- _was_ alive was nothing short of dizzying and overwhelming. 

As if sensing his discomfort, Natasha’s expression softened. “It’s okay.” 

Bucky shook his head. “It’s really not.” 

Natasha pursed her lips. “No, I guess it’s not.” 

-

When Bucky closed his eyes and tried to sleep that night, blue eyes loomed over him in the darkness. 

-

Alpine hopped up on the table as he ate breakfast that morning, and Bucky, frankly, didn’t have the energy to tell her to get down. She curled up against his coffee cup and went back to sleep, Bucky reaching over to pet her soft, white fur as he scrolled through his emails. 

_Dear Mr. Barnes,_

_Please find talking points attached for the press briefing on the Hydra murders._

_Best,_  
Patrick Connolly  
White House Press Secretary 

Bucky let out a sigh as he scrolled through the attachment. While it wasn’t exactly unexpected, he almost dropped his phone when he saw the last bullet point. 

_The idea that there was an original Captain America, named Steven Grant Rogers, is a conspiracy theory that is being perpetuated by fringe websites and fake news outlets._

Bucky’s stomach churned as he read the words, and then re-read them, and then re-read them a third time. 

He furrowed his brow as he scrolled through a number of news articles.

_Captain America Rumored to Have Originally Been Steven Grant Rogers_

_Steven Grant Rogers, Gone from History_

_Who was Steven Grant Rogers?_

Bucky dropped his phone in his oatmeal. Alpine’s eyes opened wide and she hopped off of the table so quickly it was as though he’d just committed some sort of moral offense. “Fuck,” he murmured, before glancing back over at Alpine. “Sorry, girl.” 

He fished his phone out of the oatmeal and wiped it off with his sleeve. 

He checked the secure email that Natasha had set up for him, and frowned when he saw the subject line.

_Time running out._

There wasn’t anything in the email, but there didn’t need to be. 

Bucky took a deep, shuddering breath. He knew that Natasha was right--they had to buy time. But how much time they would be able to buy was a very good question, especially with these news articles. How the hell had that information gotten out? Aside from him, the president, Natasha, and a few choice individuals at the CIA, Steven Grant Rogers either didn’t exist or was dead and had been dead for a very long time. 

He made a face and wrote back. _Do we know why?_

The reply from Natasha came almost immediately. _No, but I’ll figure it out._

He smiled, despite himself. That was the thing about people like Natasha and Peggy. When there was a problem, they did everything in their power to fix it. 

Though calling this a ‘problem’ might have been the understatement of the fucking century, he thought. 

-

That was how he found himself in the White House’s Rose Garden, wearing a suit that he hadn’t worn since Gabe’s funeral, looking out at the sea of reporters in front of him. 

Bucky coughed into what he was pretty certain was about two dozen different microphones. 

Connolly had told him that the remarks would be loaded into the teleprompter. All he had to do was show up, remind everyone that he was still alive, say the words they wanted him to, and then he could go back to living his life in peace.

What that meant, he wasn’t so sure, and he hadn’t been sure for a long time. 

“Ladies and Gentleman, I’m here today, because I would like to put a very disturbing rumor to rest. Steven Grant Rogers, the man that many media outlets are attempting to claim was the original Captain America was…”

His breath caught as he stared at the words that went by. _Hydra agent._ Ellis, who was standing off to the side, cleared his throat. 

Bucky took a deep breath. For a second, he wanted to tell the world that the president was attempting to force him to lie about a man who had saved the entire eastern seaboard during the war. A good man. A great one.

But the words wouldn’t come. All he could think about was what Natasha had told him in his apartment. _You were convenient to them._ _Running out of time._

He took a deep breath and decided to say the next best thing, “Was fabricated by Hydra. The Ellis administration remains committed to strong, anti-terrorism campaigns through all of our intelligence agencies, and wants to assure the American people that our information suggests that at this time, Hydra is not a threat to the American people. 

“And that I,” Bucky let out a shuddering breath. He’d said the words so many times over the years that he’d grown to barely feel them on his lips, but now, they took on a new weight. They felt poisonous. 

He felt poisonous. 

“I, Captain America, am committed to keeping the American people safe. Thank you.” 

As soon as he stopped speaking, a hush fell over the crowd, before reporters were on their feet, shouting questions over each other in their determination to be heard. 

Patrick stepped back up to the microphones and waved Bucky aside. Bucky was grateful, even if it was a small mercy. 

“I’d like to remind everyone here that they agreed not to ask Mr. Barnes any follow-up questions, thank you.” 

-

When he got home, he walked as calmly as he could--he had long since learned that Alpine had Natasha’s reflexes and would be easily spooked if he ran through the door--before he went to the bathroom, wrenched the door open, doubled over the toilet, and threw up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> catch me on Tumblr at plutosrose and on twitter as plutosrose1 <3


	4. Chapter 4

Although his involvement with SHIELD since the war had been peripheral, that didn’t mean that he could ignore them--or the president, or the U.S. national security apparatus either. 

Although he definitely tried. Poor Natasha, more often than not, as his official handler, unofficial assistant, and sometimes, he thought, friend, was the one that had to deal with the fallout. 

Case in point, that morning, his phone chimed so loudly that Alpine screamed and leapt right off of him before he was able to fully open his eyes. Sometimes he wondered if Natasha had found a way to make text alerts from her louder than all of his others. 

Then again, it wasn’t like he got a lot of texts. Even though he might have physically been younger than forty, he definitely thought of himself as an old man more often than he didn’t (and the ribbing from the few SHIELD agents he had the misfortune of encountering didn’t help, either.) 

That, and he received texts from Natasha in an encrypted app, so that might have had something to do with it. 

_**Natasha** _   
_I’ve gotten six texts from Ellis’s COS in the past hour  
You really pissed him off_

_**Me**_  
Good 

_**Natasha**_  
Not good - if you don’t remember, if we’re going to find him we need him to not be breathing down our necks

 _ **Me**_  
They tried to get me to say that Steve was a Hydra agent on live tv  
I’m not doing that  
I’m not insulting his memory that way  
You have to know that it killed me to tell them that he wasn’t real

He sighed and dropped his phone on the bed next to him.

He squeezed his eyes shut. It was mornings like this one when he was distinctly aware of the fact that he’d been alive for too long.

 _ **Natasha**_  
I’ll think of something  
It’ll be a few days before anyone realizes the bugs are missing   
You apparently are *that* boring lol 

_**Me**_  
Good to know >>

 _ **Natasha**_  
For now though, just...be yourself  
Your boring, boring self lol 

_**Me**_  
Thanks, i really appreciate it

Being his boring old self meant waking up, having his old man breakfast, as Natasha had referred to it, and waiting patiently for another day to pass. 

God, what he wouldn’t have given to have this kind of leisure time back before the war. 

What he did give, he thought, with an unpleasant twist of his mouth. 

He brought up the calendar on his phone to see if there were any upcoming appointments (which was a little bit of a farce sometimes, but he’d gotten used to lying to himself) and noticed that it was Thursday, the day that he usually visited Peggy. 

Yes, okay, he could do this, he thought. Just act normal until Natasha was able to come up with a plan. He’d barely been able to sleep since he’d found out that Steve was still alive, but the prospect of doing _something_ , even if he didn’t know what that something was yet, did make him feel a little bit more reassured. 

A little bit more ready to march straight into battle.

Not that this was a battle, he reminded himself, chastising himself for thinking of finding Steve as a fight. Then again, maybe it would be.

_Steve was spitting mad by the time he’d wrenched him out of the alley behind the dance hall. “I had him on the ropes! I don’t need someone to look after me,” he’d hissed, and his eyes had glinted dangerously, in the exact way that they did when Steve was on the verge of making him mad on purpose for the sole purpose of redirecting the fight that he wanted to have._

_“Pal, I’ve been looking after you my entire life,” he said, returning a wry smile. The draft papers were weighing down his pocket. He’d tell Steve that night. “Just promise me that you’ll stop this shit?”_

_Steve gave him a bewildered look, and then huffed indignantly. “Yeah, no fucking promises, Buck.”_

Bucky threw back the covers, and Alpine hissed at him, before trotting after him as he went to go shower. “I promise I’ll feed you in a little bit,” he murmured, scrubbing his hands over his face again. “I’m not having the best morning, girl.” 

Alpine, very considerately, made herself scarce until he’d showered and had a chance to put out some food in her bowl. 

He stared down at it and closed his eyes for a few seconds. “God, Steve,” he murmured to himself, “It should have never been you.” 

-

“Morning, Mr. Barnes,” April, the receptionist at Peggy’s home, said. Bucky studied her for a moment, noticing the resigned and weary look in her eyes. “Nurse Peterson wanted me to give you an update on Ms. Carter today.”

Bucky nodded. “Okay?”

April held a note out in front of her. “Please let Mr. Barnes know that today is not a good day for Ms. Carter. He’s welcome to see her, but he should keep his visit brief.” 

Bucky didn’t even realize that he’d been feeling numb until he felt like it was on the verge of tears. It was like someone had hit him with a cattle prod, the feeling was so intense. 

“Mr. Barnes, are you alright?”

Bucky nodded. “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine...I’ll just see her for a few minutes, if that’s alright?”

April’s expression softened and she nodded. “Of course, I think it’s really great that you come every week to see her. She’s always talking about your visits, according to the nurses.” 

Bucky tried to smile at her, but the expression felt stilted. He nodded and passed by the reception desk, heading down the corridor to Peggy’s room. Whatever Captain America face he’d been trying to wear for the past few decades was slipping more than it ever had before. 

When he got to Peggy’s room, she was wide awake, sitting up and watching the news. 

“Hey Pegs,” he said softly, but there was no answer. Instead, the volume on the television got louder. 

_James “Bucky” Barnes, also known by his codename, Captain America, spoke to reporters yesterday in the White House Rose Garden, assuring the American public that there is currently no threat from the Nazi splinter group known as Hydra. Barnes also assured the public that the claims that there was an original Captain America are false, calling it, and I quote, ‘fabricated by Hydra.’ We’ll be continuing to follow this story as it develops. And now, back to Janice with the weather._

His eyes widened.

Peggy turned slowly and stared at him.

“You said he was… _what_?”

“It was the best option,” he said, though that didn’t--and hadn’t--stopped him from feeling guilty. In the background, the television had switched to live coverage of World Security Council Secretary Alexander Pierce announcing that he would be seeking the nomination of his party to run against President Ellis. 

Peggy flicked the television off.

“The nurses here seem to have forgotten that I am perfectly capable of using the television,” Peggy laughed, and although the tension in her muscles and bones was easy to see from where Bucky was standing, she didn’t lay back down in her bed. “There’s been non-stop news coverage about this mysterious original Captain America, and here’s James on television telling the world that he doesn’t exist!”

Bucky sat on the chair next to her bed and leaned in, dropping his voice. “What was I supposed to do, Pegs?”

“This was your opening,” she glared at him. “This was your chance to tell the world what we’ve been keeping from them all these years. I’m not proud of what I did, James. There isn’t a single day that’s passed where I haven’t thought of him. But I never...I never stood up and told the entire world that Hydra had made him up. Especially not when there are actual photos of him out there.” 

Peggy let out a shuddering breath and leaned back onto her pillows. “James...I could have helped you figure this out...I...you didn’t…”

Bucky reached out and held her hand in his as she took a few more breaths. He bit his lip, before he said, “I’m going to figure it out, okay?” He was fairly certain that he hadn’t been followed into the retirement home, but there was no telling what Ellis or the U.S. government would do. He’d certainly been alive long enough to know that much for sure.

Peggy nodded, her eyes slipping closed for a moment. When she opened them again, she smiled widely up at him, which made his heart sink. He knew that smile too well. 

“James,” she murmured. “The war is over.”

Bucky brought her hand up to his lips and gave her a gentle kiss. “Yeah Pegs, the war is over.” 

-

His entire body was thrumming with anxiety after he left Peggy asleep. Every visit was harder than the last one, and this one...he wasn’t sure that he could face Peggy again. Not after what he’d said on television. Not after what he suspected might have happened to Steve. 

It was just suspicions, to be sure, he thought, as he made his way down from the home and the smattering of suburban townhouses and large, leafy trees, toward the bars that populated Adams Morgan’s main strip. 

It was still early to be sure, but it would take him hours to get drunk, and it wasn't like bars would kick him out, anyway.

_”According to Erksine’s research,” Peggy said, watching him warily as he polished off a bottle of whiskey. “You shouldn’t be able to get drunk.”_

_Bucky, for his part, had just unscrewed another bottle and tipped it back, drinking from it long and hard. “Fucking watch me.”_

Going to bars wasn’t really part of his regular routine--it hadn’t been for a while, since the world had started to look less and less familiar. At one point, he had a date in mind for when that had happened, but if anyone asked him now, he wouldn’t be able to remember it. Like a lot of things, it had slipped out of view, lost in the recesses of nearly a century of thoughts and memories. 

He’d gone looking for love a handful of times, but it had been decades now since he’d put any effort into it. Too much time had passed for him, and most people were too enamored of Captain America to make pursuing a relationship feel like a viable option. 

_”You know every girl in the neighborhood has a crush on you.” Steve asked, though Bucky supposed that he wasn’t asking, so much as he was telling him._

_He laughed._

_“It can’t possibly be all of them.”_

_Steve’s expression turned from almost accusatory to amused in an instant. He elbowed him lightly. “That’s Bucky Barnes, ladies and gentleman, the patron saint of humility.”_

Only a couple decades later and he’d been getting blown in front of the White House. How times changed, he thought with a wry grin.

It was at about that point that he noticed a man at the other end of the bar looking pointedly in his direction. The bar was crowded that night, but there was no mistaking the look. Just because pursuing a relationship had been a little pointless didn’t mean that the occasional one-night stand wasn’t worth his while.

After five shots he had started to feel a little buzzed, and taking someone home to fuck felt like the perfect thing that he needed to get out of his head.

Later that night, he leaned over and squinted down at his phone in the darkness, keeping it out of view of the man in his bed. The man shifted in his sleep, but otherwise didn’t wake up. Bucky felt a wave of relief. 

There was a single message from Natasha. 

_six am, rock creek park_


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> beta by the incredible xceru <3

The wind was just starting to kick up when he got to Rock Creek Park that morning. He pulled his hoodie over his head, shoved his hands in his pockets, and forced himself to look down at the ground. He was recognized when he went out more often than he wasn’t, but it generally helped to not look directly at anyone who passed by. And thankfully, people were usually too far into their own little bubbles to realize that he’d just walked past them. 

He kept walking, past the extremely early morning joggers, past the handful of people walking their dogs, and past more large, leafy trees than he could count. It wasn’t until he reached Boulder Bridge that he heard Natasha say, “Good job, you were so boring I’m pretty sure that no one followed us out here.”

At another point, maybe her appearing out of nowhere would have startled him, but at this point, with the prospect of Steve being alive after all these years so tantalizingly close, it kind of felt like nothing could shock him. Either that, or he was back to thinking that he’d been alive for way too long. 

“Thanks Tasha, it’s all I want in life, to be incredibly boring.” And while to some degree he was being sarcastic, it was also kind of true. After the war, he’d mostly just wanted to be left alone, and not too much had changed over the past few decades. 

Natasha rested her hands on the ledge and looked out at the water. “I think I have some leads.” 

“I assumed you did, otherwise you would never make me wake up this early.” It was the only thing that he could say to stop his stomach from churning. 

She smiled a little. “Yeah, can’t forget about your beauty sleep.” 

He gave her a playful nudge. 

“I need you to know though,” she said, folding her hands and keeping her eyes trained away from him. “If we go down this road, there’s no turning back.”

He clenched his jaw. “I know that. I don’t want to turn back.”

“I just have to be clear about that.” She nodded, letting out a sigh. “We do this, we’re in it until the very end. We might find out some things that you’d rather not know.” 

Bucky sighed and scrubbed a hand over his face. “It killed me to go up there and tell them that he wasn’t real. You have to know that.” If he wasn’t a coward, he thought, he would have told the world that Steve was real, that he was alive, and that he, James Buchanan Barnes, had never been the real Captain America. 

“You did what you had to do.”

“That isn’t very comforting.”

“It isn’t meant to be.”

Natasha pulled a file out of her bag and shoved it into his hands.

Bucky furrowed his brow. “What’s this?” 

“What I’ve been able to get on the Winter Soldier. It’s not much. But...I have a feeling that there’s more out there. A lot more.” 

Bucky pursed his lips, turning the folder over in his hands. He opened it, only to be greeted with the same picture that he’d seen in Ellis’s office. 

“They’ve managed to pin five different murders on him within the past two weeks. All Hydra-connected.”

Bucky furrowed his brow. “Are there seriously that many Hydra operatives out there for him to be able to kill?” Ellis had brought up Hydra in their Oval Office meeting, but even then mentioning them had seemed like a broader ploy to make himself look tough on national security (not that he really needed it after the little kidnapping incident). 

Natasha forcefully took the file out of his hands, giving him a look that told him that she could tell that he would have stayed up all night pouring over its contents. “I don’t know yet, but I want to find out. It’s going to take a little more time for me to do that.”

Bucky let out an exasperated sigh. “I thought you said that time was running out.” 

Natasha nodded. “You might have noticed that the Secretary of the World Security Council is running for president. Old friend of Nick’s. I don’t trust him.”

Bucky raised an eyebrow. “The guy who threw an Iron Man-themed party for his niecelast year? That guy?” 

Natasha nodded and plucked a sheet of paper out of the file and pushed it into his hands. “Email exchange between him and Sitwell, asking Sitwell to come and work for his campaign.”

“I don’t see what this has to do with anything,” Bucky said, staring down at the paper. “What does him asking Sitwell to leave SHIELD and work on the campaign have to do with Steve? How did you get this anyway? This looks like a personal email address.”

Natasha shrugged. “I have my methods. It’s not _just_ that he’s asking him to work for the campaign, it’s the fact that he wants him to be his national security advisor, and it’s this.” 

She jabbed her finger at the last two lines of Pierce’s last email, which began with a _W_ and an _S_.

“Okay, that can’t be a code. That’s not even subtle,” Bucky scoffed. 

Natasha gave him an unimpressed look. “Steve rescued you from an exploding factory where you were being held prisoner by a man with a red face. These Hydra assholes aren’t exactly known for any kind of subtlety.”

Bucky chewed his lip and nodded. “Yeah, okay, you might have a point. So what...what are we supposed to do?” 

“There’s a base on Roosevelt Island that I think we should check out first. According to the information that I was able to dig up, it’s been abandoned for months. Beyond that, I think we have to run through Steve’s current victims and see if there’s any kind of pattern--maybe some kind of indication of where he would go next.” 

Bucky’s stomach twisted uncomfortably at the words ‘Steve’s current victims.’ As hot-headed and rebellious as Steve had been in their youth--their real youth--he wasn’t a bully, nor was he cruel. This made him sound cruel. This made him sound like he’d become something ugly and twisted. 

A monster.

Natasha gave him a worried look. “Are you alright?”

Bucky swallowed and nodded. “Yeah, sorry. I feel like I’ve had a lot of time to mourn Steve’s death, but...this is something else. I can barely wrap my head around the fact that he’s still alive.” That, and he felt like he might combust thinking about what had no doubt happened to Steve over the past few decades to make him into the man in the photograph.

“I’m not saying this is going to be easy,” Natasha said, placing a hand on his arm. “Because it won’t be. It won’t. But maybe, at the end of this road, we will have a way to bring him back home.” 

“And if we don’t?”

Natasha smiled sadly.

“Let’s not think about that unless we have to, yeah?” 

Bucky nodded and passed Natasha back the copy of Sitwell’s email. “I’m not going to turn back. I used to tell him that I was with him until the end of the line, and I meant that. I fucking meant that. I’m willing to do whatever it takes in order to bring him home.”

Natasha’s smile grew a little brighter, a little happier. “Then what are we waiting for, James? It’s time to get to work.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks again to the lovely xceru for the beta <3

These days he rarely left DC, not even to go across the river into Virginia, preferring to keep his life inside a tidy little bubble. When he and Natasha crossed the Key Bridge that morning and he looked out to the horizon, he suddenly could feel just how vast the world really was, and the prospect of actually finding Steve felt nothing short of overwhelming. 

This had been Natasha’s suggestion--apparently the first place to look for Steve was at a nearby Hydra facility in Arlington. The fact that there was one _so_ close made Bucky feel sick to his stomach. After the war had ended, Bucky had done his best to get the hell out of any fighting and just live his life. What did that make him? A selfish coward. Steve would have never abandoned the fight that easily. 

They ditched the car several blocks away and continued on foot to the island under the cover of darkness. At any other time, the island would have been crowded with people jogging or walking their dogs, but mercifully, there was no one there.

It didn’t mean that they were any less careful, darting in and out of the shadows and staying out of sight. 

It wasn’t until they had reached the middle of the island--directly in front of a large statue of Theodore Roosevelt giving what Bucky thought to be a very disapproving look at the two of them, that Natasha motioned for him to follow her out of cover. 

“I haven’t seen a base,” Bucky whispered. Natasha brought a finger to her lips, before tapping out a combination on the bricks underfoot. 

Suddenly, the ground was shaking underneath them. Bucky braced himself--and Natasha, for her part, simply stared ahead--as a door rose out of the ground. 

“You can’t be serious--there was something underneath here the entire time?” It made his heart clench in his chest. Steve had given up his life to stop Hydra, and here was a Hydra Base underneath a tourist attraction that thousands of people must have walked on over the past few years. 

Natasha went forward, prying the door open, and motioning for him to follow down the stairs. 

He took a deep breath and followed after her--he’d promised her that there would be no turning back. And he definitely wasn’t about to start now. 

It was dark and quiet as they descended into the underground facility, and each room that he and Natasha cleared made his stomach twist uncomfortably. 

While the base was mostly cleared out, it was obvious that there were some things that had been left behind--likely either because they were too heavy to be removed in a hurry or because whoever left them there didn’t think they would make a difference if someone discovered them. 

Bucky had a sinking feeling in his stomach that told him that the second one was the reason why. 

The air was thick and humid, and occasionally Bucky heard the squeak of a rat running by. 

Something about the place was getting underneath his skin, making him feel like his heart was hammering in his chest, making him feel like he might suffocate. 

He had been alive long enough to understand the fact that profound moments didn’t always hit you over the head, sometimes they snuck into you, burrowing deep inside of your unconscious until they became something that you would never be able to forget. 

He was in the middle of a moment like that right then, face to face with a hard metal chair, with thick restraints, framed by a grotesque crown of electrodes. 

Bucky lowered his gun slightly and took a few cautious steps closer to the chair. He opened his mouth to speak, but when he tried, no sound came out. He felt like he’d been punched in the gut. 

“What is this place?” he breathed. 

“One of about a dozen Hydra facilities across the country.”

“A _dozen_?”

He felt sick to his stomach--he and Steve and the rest of the Howling Commandos had gone all across Europe pulling Hydra’s bases out by their roots. Steve had drowned in the Arctic no doubt thinking that he had, at the very least, managed to take the Red Skull down with him.

And this facility had the audacity to be here, like Steve had never sacrificed his life at all.

Bucky kicked the chair with his foot.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Natasha said, reaching out to pull Bucky back a couple of paces. “This base has been abandoned for months as far as I can tell, but who knows what kind of shit we could trigger if we aren’t being careful.”

Bucky nodded. “You’re right, I’m sorry.”

But none of that answered his most pressing question, which was _what the hell was he looking at?_

As if she could hear his thoughts, Natasha said--in far too expressionless a tone, he thought-- “You don’t want to know.”

“Yes, I do.”

“No, you really don’t.”

His eyes fell on the restraints. He wasn’t sure what they were made of, but if they were used to hold _Steve_ they must have been something strong. “This is my fault,” he murmured. “When he was declared dead, I didn’t keep pushing for them to find him. I should have known that he was too stubborn a bastard to just up and die like that.” 

Natasha shook her head. “It would be unreasonable to expect to know something like that.”

Bucky didn’t say anything in return, he just looked at the crown of the machine, and felt his heart clench in his chest and his throat grow tighter. “I wish it had been me, how’s that for unreasonable? I wish it had been me in that goddamn plane. Or hell, maybe I could have fallen off of that train when we were going after Zola. Maybe they would have taken me and left Steve alone.”

_The blast ripped the train open. He barely had time to find something to hold onto before he was swinging back over the white expanse below them. It was easy for him to imagine slipping off of the train, his body falling through the cold air, and finding the darkness of death on the jagged rocks below._

_But that moment of intense terror was fleeting, because Steve reached out and pulled him back. “I’m got you, Buck.”_

Maybe he deserved to have fallen. Maybe that was what was supposed to have happened. 

Regardless, there was no question in his mind that he would have taken seventy years of torture and abuse if it meant that Steve would have been spared. He knew that to be true down to his bones. 

Natasha, for her part, however, seemed completely unphased by his remark, looking directly into his eyes with an infuriatingly neutral expression. “Then Hydra would have had two supersoldiers instead of one. There was never any kind of exchange to make, James.” 

He hated the fact that she was right. “You know, Peggy told me the same thing, a very long time ago.”

A little smile appeared on her features. “That’s because she’s a smart woman.” 

“She is,” Bucky smiled a little, feeling a swell of warm fondness. “She would tear the world apart to find him, you know. I have to do this for the both of us.” The electrodes were making his mind run wild--he didn’t know what they were for, but it couldn’t have meant anything good. 

Whatever they found out, Peggy could never know, he decided. 

Natasha paused, taking a few steps away from him and the chair. For a moment, Bucky couldn’t stop staring at it, imagining Hydra men--not unlike the ones who had poked and prodded him at the factory in Azzano--sending wave after wave of electricity through Steve’s body until he couldn’t stand up, until he couldn’t remember his own name, until everything about his life, his personality, his memories, just leaked right out of his ears.

“Bucky,” he heard Natasha whisper. “Bucky you….”

Natasha hesitated.

She never hesitated. 

“Bucky, I think you have to see this.” 

When he turned around and followed her line of sight, his eyes widened. 

Because on the furthest wall inside the facility, there was a man, arms and legs splayed out and nailed to the wall. Someone had sliced open his arms and legs a while ago, because the blood had long since dried, and the man was unmistakably dead. 

Written above him, however…

“Order through pain,” Natasha breathed. “Bucky, he…”

He knew what she was going to say before the words came out of her mouth. He shook his head. “We don’t know that he did this,” he said, before adding, “And if he did do this, we don’t know why, either, we just…” 

But if Steve had killed the man as some kind of warning, to send some kind of message, whatever meaning it had was lost on him. “Natasha, you didn’t know him. He wasn’t a cold-blooded killer.” He’d seen Steve pry apart Nazis with his bare hands, but it had never been for the sake of killing them. It had always been in service of doing the right thing, and fighting the right war. 

Natasha turned to look at him then, and her expression--which he was so used to seeing as neutral when he wanted to see his own anger and frustration reflected back at him--looked sad. He almost wished that he didn’t see anything at all. 

“Bucky, I think you need to be prepared for…” she trailed off, and Bucky shook his head. 

“I told you that I was in this, didn’t I? No matter what? Well I’m in it, no matter what.” He fixed Natasha with a steely gaze, and her expression snapped back to something much more neutral.

“Of course, James. I understand,” she murmured. 

“Do you?”

She drew her lips into a tight line. “Yes.” 

He felt like there was a story there, but he didn’t press for it. He couldn’t, anyway, not when he felt like he was on the brink of bursting into flames over decades of bullshit and lies. 

“Okay,” he nodded. “Okay.”

-

That night, he went to a club with every intention of getting stupid drunk and taking a man home to try and get out of his head. It usually worked--it took a lot of effort to get drunk, but he’d never had any trouble picking up men, both because of his looks and because of the whole Captain America thing. 

He despised it, but if it got his dick sucked when he needed it, then well, it occasionally did serve its purpose. Sometimes the men would ask him about footage of a mission that Captain America had done that appeared on the news, and he usually knew enough to bullshit his way through the conversation. And even if he didn’t, well, it wasn’t usually a conversation that those men were after anyway. 

But that night, nothing was working. He’d drank about six whiskey sours and felt nothing more than a slight buzz, and the man that had sidled up to him at the bar was so fucking dull that he couldn’t even force himself to pay attention, not even when faced with the prospect of a blowjob in the bathroom. 

All he could fucking think about was Steve, slicing open the man and leaving behind words written in blood in the Hydra facility, over and over and over again. 

He ended up walking home--far too sober--and crawling into bed, with Alpine curling up on the pillow next to him. 

“I can feel your judgment,” he murmured to her, but Alpine simply purred happily from her position on the pillow and fell asleep. 

He scrubbed a hand over his face and curled up in his blankets, keeping his eyes closed until his body finally was able to get to sleep. 

Sometime later, however, he woke up, with the strangest sensation that he was being watched. 

In the darkness, he could make out a figure sitting in the armchair by the window. 

“Steve?”


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> once again beta'd by the incredibly xceru <3

Bucky sat up so quickly that Alpine hissed at him, offended that he would disturb their careful sleeping arrangement. Normally, he would give her at least a perfunctory apology, but right now, his brain felt like it was simultaneously useless and full of static and about to burst into overdrive at the sight of the figure in the darkness. 

Silence stretched out before them. In the months after the war, Bucky had found silence more unnerving than noise. Silence was what he’d gotten in those terrifying few hours between Zola leaving him strapped to the table in the factory half-drugged out of his goddamn mind and Steve lifting him off of it. Silence was death.

He’d gotten more comfortable with silence in the intervening years and decades, but in that moment, he felt silence squirm underneath his skin. 

“Steve,” he breathed, fingers flexing uselessly at his side. He wanted nothing more than to reach out and touch him. Confirm that he was real, and not a ghost from his past. 

He had so many of those now. 

“You need to stop looking for me.” 

Steve might have been shrouded in darkness, and he might have looked different than he did in ‘45 when he was America’s Golden Boy, but there was no mistaking that voice for anyone other than Steve Rogers. 

“I can’t do that,” Bucky said. 

Silence. Steve was sitting so still in the armchair that for a brief moment, Bucky had to wonder if he was still sleeping. 

Then, Steve moved.

He moved slowly, and methodically--two words that Bucky had never associated with Steve Rogers in the entire time that he’d known him. No, the Steve that he’d known was a force of nature. Equal parts wild, brilliant, reckless, and hard-headed. It wasn’t this man, slowly emerging out of the darkness, scraggly blond hair and dead eyes. 

Bucky’s breath caught as Steve moved closer. He couldn’t move, the weight of spending seven decades without Steve crashing down on him. 

With Steve out of the shadows, he could see flashes of scarring across his hairline, underneath his right eye, and climbing across his throat and down toward his shoulders. 

“You need to stop looking for me,” Steve repeated so venomously that for a moment, Bucky felt the impulse to agree. He had been complicit in the U.S. government’s attempts to erase Steve from history--surely he could agree to the same thing if Steve was the one asking. 

“I’m not going to stop,” Bucky said, and before he could move an inch, Steve had surged forward, wrapping his hand tightly around his throat. 

Bucky gasped for air, hands coming up to try and wrench Steve’s off of him, but Steve was quick to pin his arms back down with his other hand. “You should.” 

It had taken a while for Bucky to get used to the fact that he was much stronger than he used to be. After he’d told Peggy the full story about Zola’s experiments, the SSR had put him through a battery of tests, with agents concluding that his vitals--as well as the amount that he was able to lift--was almost exactly the same as Steve’s. 

But all that strength frankly didn’t matter when Steve was pinning him down. 

The image of the man in the bunker, sliced open, blood spilling on the floor was inescapable now. As much as it made Bucky feel guilty, it was hard for him to not wonder if Steve had held that man down too before he’d carved him open. 

“I’m not going to stop,” Steve leaned in and breathed in his ear. “I’m not going to stop until they’re all dead. Do you understand that?” 

Bucky wheezed out something that sounded like agreement, because if he had been the one put in that chair--if he was the one bearing the weight of those scars--he would have told Steve exactly the same thing. 

Apparently satisfied, Steve let out of Bucky’s neck, and Bucky gasped for breath, wheezing desperately as Steve stared at him. 

“I think it’s better if you forget I existed,” Steve said, far more gently than his demand that he stop looking for him. “I’m not the person you used to know. He’s been gone for a very, very long time.” 

Of course, Bucky was not that moved by Steve’s insistence that he was someone else. A lot of time had passed, sure, but he knew Steve Rogers’s over-dramatic bullshit when it was staring him in the face. 

“I don’t know what they could do to you to make you think that I wouldn’t be able to recognize you if I saw you.” 

Steve laughed, low and mean. It was a sound that Bucky wished he could forget--one that he would have easily traded for the memories of the mind-numbing silence that had filled his mind when he was certain that he was going to die on Zola’s table. 

“A lot,” Steve said simply. 

And just like that, he retreated back into the shadows, ducking out of the window across from Bucky’s bed. 

-

Bucky would have thought the whole thing was a dream aside from the fact that the window was still open when he woke up a few hours later. 

He couldn’t bring himself to close it, just like he couldn’t bring himself to stop thinking of Steve’s face, staring at him in the darkness. 

He leaned back in bed and rested his arm across his face. Alpine rubbed against his arm, before she hopped off of the bed and ran away, presumably realizing that he was so deep in his own bullshit that he could not be helped. 

He palmed the straining bulge in his trousers, wincing to himself. 

This had to be one of the stupider things he’d done in a very, very long time. 

The world had changed around him, shuffling off everything that had been familiar in his childhood one day at a time. After the war, free from combat and now with a very cushy job that he didn’t need to do anything to keep besides keep his mouth shut, he spent most of his time hopping between queer bars in Washington, DC. 

Peggy had repeatedly advised him to be careful, but her warnings had fallen on deaf ears. The SSR scientists had no idea how long he might live, and after the war--after Steve--being the real Captain America, for him at least, was out of the question. He might have consigned himself to a long, stupid existence, but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t have some fun in the meantime. 

Nobody came close to outing him--the men that he slept with were more terrified of losing their jobs and futures than they were interested in outing Captain America--but no one had come close to loving him, either. After those men were gone from his bed, he didn’t think about them.

He didn’t think about very much at all, really. 

But now, it felt like he was helpless to think about Steve--golden, beautiful Steve--above him, his weight settling down on him, blanketing him with his body. Steve leaning in to press a kiss against his lips, Steve sinking his teeth into his neck and rocking against him.

_Somewhere, twenty miles behind German lines, in the dead of night, Steve held him close, face pressing into his neck as he slid his hand into his pants. Bucky was so shocked that for a moment, he didn’t move at all._

_They had danced around this for years, ever since they’d moved in together after Sarah’s death. There were touches that lasted too long. Moments that never seemed to end._

_But in that moment, Steve was clutching him hard, shaking like a leaf. Steve had always burned bright with seemingly every emotion that it was possible for a person to feel, but in that moment, it felt like he was letting go of something that Bucky hadn’t even known that he was holding onto._

_It was the only time that Bucky saw through the Captain America mask that Steve wore in front of the SSR, in front of the Commandos._

_“I don’t want to die without this happening once. Just once,” Steve had whispered into his neck._

He tried to focus, tried to squash down that memory just like he had for decades, just like so many others, but the harder he tried, the more determined the memory seemed to be to come right back up, until he could practically feel Steve breathing against his neck. 

His cock was stupidly hard in his pajama pants at the thought. Wincing, he shoved his pants down just enough to get his hand around himself, jerking uselessly, trying to banish any thoughts of Steve from his head. 

He tried to think of the man that he’d picked up a few days ago in Adams Morgan, only he could only remember his torso and his cock, and when he tried to remember his face, he pictured Steve’s instead, scars and all. 

An embarrassing whine escaped his throat, and he threw an arm across his face to try and hide from his guilt. 

He tried to think of getting on his knees for some anonymous man in Lafayette Park, a cock smearing against his lips, and again, thoughts of Steve crept into those memories. None of those men had looked like Steve, even in the dark, but now, it felt impossible not to think of him. 

Desperate now, his thoughts turned to a man that he’d dated for a few months in the early 1970s, a beautiful Georgetown University master’s student that Peggy had repeatedly told him was too young for him. He tried to imagine his cock inside of him, he tried to imagine riding his face, or sucking his cock, but it was useless. Even now when he was able to get halfway into the fantasy, he imagined Steve again, which made his hips jerk involuntarily, cock thrusting into his fist. 

When he came, spilling across his hand, he felt even guiltier, because that man had been dead for decades, having been drafted in Vietnam and never come home. 

Not unlike Steve, he thought, his gut twisting unpleasantly.

Just then, Alpine screeched from the kitchen, no doubt feeling incredibly frustrated that he hadn't immediately gotten up to feed her. As annoying as it was to hear Alpine screaming for her food this early in the morning, he was a little grateful for _something_ to get himself out of his head. 

-

As it turned out, however, being able to ‘get out of his head’ only lasted long enough to feed Alpine, make himself some oatmeal, and scroll through about three different headlines about Alexander Pierce’s presidential campaign before he let his phone rest on the table, his mind wandering back to the image of Steve in his armchair. 

His fingers twitched uselessly as he stared down at his phone’s lock screen. He knew that he had to tell Natasha that Steve had come to his apartment. He knew that he could trust her--at least, he was reasonably sure that he could, and that was more or less enough for him.

But there was a part of him that wanted to hold the fact that he’d seen Steve close to his chest. To cherish the fact that Steve was still alive, even if it wasn’t a miracle and was really a nightmare. 

Just as he was about to set his phone back down, it went off. 

_**Natasha**_  
Ellis wants to see you

 _ **Me**_  
I literally just saw him the other day  
What does he want to see me about? 

_**Natasha**_  
What do you think?

Bucky swallowed hard and his grip on the phone tightened so much that there was a risk that it might crack in his hands. He’d been out of the fight for so long that sometimes his own strength was a surprise to him. 

_**Me**_  
Do you think I should go see him? 

_**Natasha**_  
Yes. 

Natasha probably wasn’t bullshitting him, and she had told him that they needed to do everything they could to keep the president and the rest of the government off their backs while they looked for Steve. 

He thought about telling her about Steve for a moment, before it occurred to him that it probably wasn’t the best idea to do so over text. Not even over the phone if they weren’t in the same room. Yes, that was probably safest. 

_**Me**_  
Okay, sure, set it up 

_**Me**_  
You want to meet for lunch after? At our usual spot? 

He bit his lip and put his phone down on the counter. It was a code that Natasha had suggested a long time ago when they’d first met, just in case something happened and they needed to be extra cautious. He’d balked at the idea originally--the deal that he’d made with SSR and SHIELD meant that he was out of the fight for good. What did he need secret codes for? 

But now, every second that passed without a response made his heart beat so hard in his chest that he practically felt light-headed with anxiety. 

Bucky took a deep breath to steady himself and tried to escape the feeling that he was being watched.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as ever, thank you to xceru for her rockstar work beta'ing <3

Ellis, to put it bluntly, looked fucking pissed when Bucky was shown into his office.

Of course, every time that Ellis appeared on the news, he looked fucking pissed, but this was something else entirely. Even Steve appearing in his bedroom, back from the dead, didn’t seem nearly as shocking as the way that the President of the goddamn United States was currently boring a hole through his skull with his glare.

“You’re late.”

“I’m really not,” Bucky mumbled, practically jumping out of his skin when Ellis slammed a hand on his desk. 

“Stop fucking bullshitting me, Barnes.” 

Bucky raised an eyebrow. “I mean, I’m not _that_ late, you know what traffic is like in this part of DC.” 

The glare that Ellis had levelled at him made it very clear that this was the wrong answer. Ellis slid a picture across the desk and settled in the chair behind it. “What the fuck is this?” 

It was a picture of him and Natasha on the bridge leading to Theodore Roosevelt Island. He wrinkled his nose at it, mentally running through where someone could have been hiding in order to get the picture. 

“How did you get this?”

That was definitely the wrong thing to say, especially since it pretty much confirmed that he and Natasha had some kind of culpability. It made him want to kick himself--especially since he had dragged Natasha into this too. He didn’t really care what the president did to him, but he very much did care if anything happened to Natasha. 

“Barnes,” Ellis said flatly. “Do you really think that you’re in any kind of position to ask me questions like that?”

Bucky wrinkled his nose. Ordinarily, when he came to see the president--well, whichever president was in office--he would settle into a chair beside the Resolute Desk, try not to think of the fact that he was literally sitting in the Oval Office, and try not to look directly at them for as long as he possibly could. 

“I was never going to say Steve was Hydra,” Bucky murmured, lips twisting unpleasantly. It wasn’t a convenient remark, and sure enough, if Natasha was there at that very moment, she would likely chastise him for being so openly defiant. “You have to know that I would never do that.” 

Ellis considered him for a moment, before he folded his hands on the desk. “Sergeant.” 

Nobody ever called him ‘Sergeant’ anymore. 

“I think it’s important that I stress that we’re on the same side,” Ellis said, as though he was carefully picking his words. “The intelligence that we have does suggest that Steve Rogers has been acting as an independent agent--possibly as an agent of Hydra. We did not send you out there to try and distress you--rather, we sent you out there as Captain America.”

Bucky let out an exasperated sigh. He’d met Richard Nixon before, and Ellis really had the audacity to try and bullshit him. Remembering Natasha’s pleas to try and fly under the radar, at that very moment, made his skin crawl. 

“Yes, sir,” he said in a clipped tone. Ellis gave him a suspicious look. It was almost as if he was trying to tell him to cut the shit and stop pretending that he was Colonel Phillips, God rest his soul. 

“Are you going to tell me what you and Romanoff were doing out there, or are you going to try to bullshit me?”

As defensive and combative as he felt in the moment (not unlike Steve, he thought sadly), it did occur to him that it was slightly bizarre that Ellis would be so fixated on the fact that he and Natasha had been spotted on the bridge to Theodore Roosevelt Island. 

“Last time I checked,” Bucky said, finding a spot of courage that hadn’t been used up over the past few decades, “It’s not a crime to do some sight-seeing, Mr. President.” 

Ellis, for his part, looked completely unimpressed. “But you weren’t there doing sight-seeing, were you Sergeant?” 

Bucky stared at the president, and the president stared back. Steve, Bucky thought, would not be so keen on folding in front of the President of the United States. Steve would not give a fuck. 

Perhaps he was doing a good job channelling Steve, because Ellis was silent for what felt like an eternity, before he looked past Bucky and seemed to admit defeat in their staring contest. 

“I would hate for this to blow back on you or Agent Romanoff,” Ellis said coolly, clearing his throat. “I think it’s best that we table this discussion for now, and then we can revisit it at another point. I hope, for your sake, that the next time that we need to have a discussion, it’s for reasons that are...slightly more pleasant.” 

“Yes, sir.”

-

“I swear, I thought he was going to arrest me,” Bucky heaved out a sigh when he met Natasha the next morning in an alleyway a few blocks away from his apartment. “When I got home, I spent three hours basically turning my apartment upside down looking for bugs. I feel like I’m losing my mind.” 

Bucky wasn’t sure what he was expecting her to say, but he definitely wasn’t expecting her to give him a steely, resolved look and say, “I don’t think we can rule out the fact that there might be more bugs, or that you might have someone following you. Ellis might think that we’re Rogers’s accomplices.”

Bucky frowned. _Accomplices._ “Jesus Christ. I shouldn’t--I’m fine ruining my own life, but you should really stop helping me while you have the chance. Get some plausible deniability. I’ll even tell Ellis that you had no idea what I was doing.” He wasn’t sure how that would explain away Natasha’s presence in the photograph that Ellis showed him. 

“Relax.”

Easier said than done. 

“I told you that I’m in this, so I’m in this,” Natasha murmured. “End of story.” 

If only that could make his heart stop hammering in his chest. 

“But Ellis isn’t the reason why you wanted to meet in person, is it?” 

Bucky took a deep breath and shook his head. He licked his lips. “I saw him. Last night. In my apartment.”

Natasha was silent for a long time, and unlike Ellis, who was already terrifying in his own right, silence from Natasha made him feel like he was in danger. 

“Barnes.” 

“If this is going to be about how we don’t know if Steve is dangerous or not, I don’t want to hear it. But I did want you to know.”

Natasha’s expression softened, and she nodded. “Okay, James. Then, is the plan still the same? Do you want to find him? Because if it is, then we’re going to have to work twice as hard to try and keep Ellis off our backs.” 

Bucky nodded absently, his mind wandering back to his bedroom the night before, to a Steve that was so terrible and different that he almost wished that he’d imagined him. 

But he couldn’t. 

Steve being alive might have been a horrible miracle, but Bucky was selfish, he thought. He preferred a world where Steve was alive over one where he wasn’t. 

“Okay,” Natasha said finally, giving him a curt nod. “Anyway, I think I know why Ellis wanted to meet with you.” 

Bucky furrowed his brow as she fished her phone out of her pocket and showed him the headline that was emblazoned across the screen. 

_Alexander Pierce accuses U.S. government of decades-long cover-up_

Bucky blinked. “How is that…” he started, before he realized that as Secretary of the World Security Council, Pierce had access to the files on Steve. On the original Captain America. “Why would he…”

It seemed, at least on its face, dreadfully stupid for Pierce to leak to the entire world that Steve was a real person. “Is this about the election? Pierce is trying to paint Ellis as being weak on national security?” Ellis had survived a kidnapping attempt, and even the congressmen who utterly despised him never went as far to say that he was weak on national security. 

“Ellis is polling in the mid-60s right now,” Natasha said, “Pretty good. Might even hit the 70s when his administration starts reminding people about the kidnapping. Something like this, well, it could really hurt him.”

“But he wasn’t...” Bucky started again, before he almost wanted to hit himself for being so stupid. Of course it wouldn’t matter that Ellis hadn’t been the one to make him Captain America or create the cover story for the entire Captain America program. He would be blamed for lying to the nation regardless. 

Bucky almost felt bad for him.

Almost. 

“So what, he wants Steve to be a Hydra agent?”

Natasha pursed her lips. “It’s a lot easier than explaining that the U.S. government was trying to do everything that they could to win the Cold War and created a cover for you, isn’t it?” 

And well, he couldn’t exactly argue with that. The election wasn’t for more than a year, but this wasn’t the kind of scandal that Ellis would be able to shake off easily. 

“So we can’t trust Ellis, and we don’t know…” The words died in his throat, as the image of the man carved open in the base floated to the top of his mind. He couldn’t bring himself to say it - and he was pretty sure that he’d never be able to. 

Natasha reached out and placed a hand on his shoulder. He grimaced and tried to avoid the impulse to collapse into her. He was so fucking tired. 

“We don’t know anything yet,” Natasha said, and Bucky wanted to believe her, even though she was the one who had noticed the man in the bunker and was the one who had prompted him to think that there might have been a kernel of truth to thinking that Steve might not be the person that he remembered. “Give me some more time to try and get some answers.” 

Bucky nodded absently.

“In the meantime,” Natasha squeezed his shoulder a little harder, as if she was trying to get him to pay attention. “If you get any unexpected visitors, keep your guard up.” 

He nodded again, though he was certain that she could probably tell that he was just going through the motions. He’d never really had his guard up when it came to Steve. 

-

The New York Times - @NYTimes - 15 min ago - **Alexander Pierce, Secretary of the World Security Council, will present evidence on large, U.S. government conspiracy, spanning decades**

After the conversation with Natasha, Bucky had set up news alerts on ‘Alexander Pierce’ and ‘government conspiracy’ and followed as many news outlets as he could think of on Twitter through a dummy account, because he had listened to Natasha’s lecture on the internet before (it might have been about the porn accounts that he followed, but it was still applicable here). 

It might have been a long shot to think that he could find Steve through a news article or two--it _definitely_ was probably a long shot, considering the fact that Steve had been able to slip in and out of his apartment--but he did hope that it would be able to turn up some kind of lead. 

Bucky scrubbed a hand over his face as he scrolled through headline after headline. He only opened one speculating on the identity of the ‘original’ Captain America before he felt sick to his stomach. 

Peggy had warned him a long time ago that even if he went public with Steve’s identity, it wasn’t like he had proof to back it up. And he did want the world to know that it was Steve--and only Steve--who had ever really been Captain America. 

But right now, right now, Bucky just wanted answers. 

He needed to find Steve. 

-

Later that night, Bucky had curled up in front of the couch, the television set at a low volume, Alpine curled up on his stomach, as he closed his eyes and tried to sleep. He wasn’t going to think too much about the fact that he wanted to stay awake all night, just in case Steve happened to come back a second time. 

It was about the time that Hulu switched over to a commercial that his phone went off. He winced, bleary-eyed as he leaned over and Alpine hissed at him and jumped down to the floor. 

News Wire - 2 min ago - **Alexander Pierce’s campaign schedules press event at International Press Club**

He scrolled through the details from the press release as he leaned back onto the couch. It was ridiculous to expect that Steve would be there, wouldn’t it? He didn’t have any proof one way or the other that Steve was even still in the country. But at the same time, Steve had shown up in his apartment the night before--even Bucky, with nearly a century of memories stored in his head--wouldn’t have been able to dream up that one. 

At the same time, it was hard for Bucky to escape the niggling feeling at the back of his mind that Steve was going to show up. 

He had no real reason to think that Steve would show up, even if, wherever Steve was, he’d seen the headlines and knew that Pierce was on the cusp of revealing more about his identity to the world. If Steve could sneak into his apartment, then it was definitely possible that Steve would be able to watch the event on television. 

But at the same time, Pierce was expecting a big turn out. The event was about him. He’d be able to hide in a crowd, if he really wanted to. 

It made sense, didn’t it?

He made a face and tried to ignore Natasha’s voice in his head telling him that it didn’t make the slightest bit of sense. That he was just latching onto disparate ideas because he was desperate to find Steve, desperate to have everything make sense. 

Resolutely deciding to ignore fake Natasha in his head, he scrolled down further and registered for the event taking place the following week. 

-

The International Press Club was a few blocks away from the White House, and was dedicated to ‘promoting freedom of the press around the world.’ Bucky had gone to a couple of events there, but after a while, they all blended together. The events were usually full of a lot of bland platitudes and included terrible food. For a long time, Peggy had vetted his public engagements, and then Natasha, and as it happened, both of them had reminded him that he didn’t exactly have the luxury of being picky. Sometimes--just like in Ellis’s case--people liked to see the original Captain America and buy into the fantasy that he really could be everywhere at once just a little longer, and complaining publicly about the United States’ involvement in foreign engagements like the Vietnam War was considered ‘bad form.’ 

He had registered under a fake name, but registering under a fake name didn’t help when the event was in person. Natasha would think that he was a fucking amateur, he thought--he hadn’t even thought to bring one of the photostatic veils with him until he was literally standing in line to be let into the venue. 

He had waved off three reporters within the span of about five minutes--not exactly focused enough to try and make up stories about missions he hadn’t been on--when he felt that same sensation of being watched that he’d felt the other day in his apartment. 

When the crowd was finally let through the doors into the lobby, Sitwell made a beeline for him. Sitwell, according to Natasha, had left SHIELD a couple weeks earlier to transition to working full time for the Pierce campaign. 

“James,” he said, grin making Bucky feel like his stomach was turning. “We certainly weren’t expecting you to be here.”

Bucky shrugged noncommittally, wondering if it was too late to pretend that he’d ended up there by accident. Jasper, by contrast, took this as a gesture of friendship, and immediately took hold of his arm. 

“We have a table set up near the front for VIP guests. You don’t even have to sit with anyone if you don’t want to. I’m sure the Secretary would be fine moving around some of our other guests to make sure that you were comfortable.”

Bucky did his best to school his expression into something neutral that Natasha would be proud of. “Yeah, okay, that sounds...yeah, that sounds okay,” he mumbled, as Jasper led him into the ballroom through a separate side entrance. 

Jasper had led him to the front of the room where a handful of tables had been cordoned off for VIPs. Mercifully, before Jasper was able to actually start asking him any in-depth questions about why he was there, he got an urgent text from Pierce. 

“Pierce would love to set-up a meet with you, if you have the time,” Jasper said as he dashed away, giving Bucky only enough time to grimace in response.

It was at about this time that he saw a shock of blond hair that was so familiar that he was, for a moment, fairly certain that he’d imagined it. 

Until he looked again. 

Steve had cut his hair and was wearing a smart button-down and trousers that honestly made him look like any one of the reporters that were crowding into the room. 

He furrowed his brow, wondering how Steve had been able to sneak into the event, when Secretary Pierce took the stage and the noise in the room dissolved into a mix of voices all trying to shout over each other. 

It was so loud, in fact, that Bucky almost missed the gunshot.

**Author's Note:**

> This Is a Ghost Story - Chapter 1  
> Creator(s): plutosrose  
> Card number: 012  
> Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28440759/chapters/69693645  
> Square filled: D4, Cap Bucky AU  
> Rating: E  
> Archive warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply  
> Major tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, Steve Rogers as the Winter Soldier, Captain America Bucky Barnes, Winter Soldier Torture, Propaganda  
> Summary: 
> 
> February 1945, Steve Rogers crashes the Valkyrie.
> 
> March 1945, a massive effort is undertaken by the Americans to replace his deeds with James "Bucky" Barnes, who now has always been Captain America.
> 
> As for Steve Rogers?
> 
> According to the U.S. government, he never existed. 
> 
> Word count: 1646 (Chapter 1)


End file.
